China’s official news agency announced yesterday that Gu Kailai (it calls her Bogu Kailai, but that’s another story), the wife of ousted Chongqing Party secretary Bo Xilai, had been formally charged with murder by the Hefei Municipal Procuratorate in Anhui Province and would face trial in the Hefei Intermediate People’s Court. Wait a minute. Hefei?

To the best of anyone’s knowledge, neither the accused nor the victim, nor indeed anything about the case, is remotely connected with Hefei. And indeed, that is very likely the reason the government has decided to try the case there. There is a long tradition of trying cases involving high-level officials outside their power base – one source (HT: Eve Sun) estimates this happens 90% of the time – because of fears they can use their local influence to influence the result. Indeed, that courts are vulnerable to this kind of pressure is readily admitted even in the most orthodox sources (see, for example, this article on the “News of the Communist Party of China” web site on why corrupt officials need to be tried outside their home base). Only Foreign Ministry spokespeople speaking to the foreign press take the trouble to deny it these days.

No doubt, then, this practice makes sense. But is it legal?

The article above quotes Wang Jixue, a current-affairs commentator, as saying that the practice has a legal basis in Article 26 of the Criminal Procedure Law, and that the provision there reflects the legislators’ profound grasp of Chinese realities. But let’s see what the Criminal Procedure Law actually says.

The basic rule of jurisdiction is set forth in Article 24: “A criminal case shall be under the jurisdiction of the people's court in the place where the crime was committed. If it is more appropriate for the case to be tried by the people's court in the place where the defendant resides, then that court may have jurisdiction over the case.” OK, so we are talking about either Chongqing or wherever Gu Kailai resides – maybe Chongqing, maybe not, but in any case certainly not Hefei.

What level of court should hear the case? That question is answered by Article 20: cases involving a potential life or death sentence shall be heard in the first instance by an intermediate-level court (even higher if the case is of province-wide or nation-wide significance). OK, no problem there.

Note that Article 24 presents some choices about location, and somebody has to decide how widely significant the case is in order to decide the appropriate level of the first-instance trial. What happens if people don’t agree? No problem: Article 25 says, “When two or more people's courts at the same level have jurisdiction over a case, it shall be tried by the people's court that first accepted it. When necessary the case may be transferred for trial to the people's court in the principal place where the crime was committed.” And if there is still disagreement, the final decision is assigned by Article 26 to the highest court that chooses to get involved in the matter: “A people's court at a higher level may instruct a people's court at a lower level to try a case over which jurisdiction is unclear and may also instruct a people's court at a lower level to transfer the case to another people's court for trial.”

Does Article 26 explain why Gu Kailai is being charged and tried in Hefei, then? No.

First of all, there is no relevant issue of unclear jurisdiction here. There is nothing to suggest that any court other than an intermediate court in Chongqing should have jurisdiction. But what about the second half of the sentence, which seems to give a superior court (in this case, it would have to be the Supreme People’s Court) unfettered discretion to transfer any case from any inferior court to any other inferior court? This can’t be the explanation, because this case hasn’t been transferred to the Hefei court. That’s where it started.

Anyone who knows anything about China will, of course, already suspect that this trial cannot possibly take place in the absence of substantial political influences. But I think it’s important to point out this particular example of that process at work. The decisions to have the Hefei procuratorate bring the prosecution and to have the trial in Hefei cannot be accounted for under the current rules of the Chinese legal system. Grammatically speaking, no legal institution could have been the subject of the verb “decide”. There was an extra-legal political decision made that this is how the matter would be handled, and that decision was then transmitted to all relevant actors in the legal system.

One caveat: the decisions could as a formal matter have come from the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and the Supreme People’s Court. In that case, though, the point still stands that the decisions don’t seem to have been made in accordance with the rules of the Criminal Procedure Law. I’m not claiming here, by the way, that there is anything inherently unjust about trying officials away from their home base. What’s interesting is that while it would be easy to amend the CPL to provide a way for these decisions to be made, nobody seems to think it necessary.

No doubt thoroughly panicked, the USOC went into deep mea culpa mode and started negotiating with the bill’s sponsors on July 18. The result was an official statement of a new policy by the USOC, with no formal Congressional action at all. Senator Bob Menendez announced, “I’m incredibly pleased that the USOC has formally adopted the requirements outlined in the Team USA Made in America Act.” USOC CEO Scott Blackmun stated, one imagines through heavily gritted teeth, “We were pleased to work with Sen. Menendez and his colleagues in Congress to address their concerns regarding Team USA’s parade uniforms.” Yeah. Real pleased, I’m sure.

In a welcome sign that our lawmakers are not completely bonkers, the new policy does not require the current uniforms to be burned or even replaced. Here it is:

All uniforms provided by sponsors, partners, licensees, or suppliers for parade ceremonies shall be “Made in the USA” as defined by the standards of the Federal Trade Commission, with the following exception allowing for a deviation from the policy:

Obtaining such parade ceremony uniforms would be in violation of U.S. law or would not comply with any applicable trade agreements or treaties to which the United States is a party;

Essential materials or parts needed to produce parade ceremony uniforms are not available in the United States;

Obtaining such parade ceremony uniforms would cause undue delay or create material financial detriment to the U.S. Olympic Committee;

It would violate IOC, Local Organizing Committee or host country laws, rules or regulations to adhere to the policy for the particular event.

If the U.S. Olympic Committee cannot obtain parade ceremony uniforms in conformance with this policy, it shall make publicly available information explaining the reasons why it cannot do so.

As a part of its Quadrennial Report to Congress, the U.S. Olympic Committee shall include an assessment of its performance under the policy, providing justifications on any instances where it has had to diverge from the policy, as well as any changes it has made to the policy.

Whether the expenditure of time and resources on this matter did more to help the US worker than anything else its sponsors could have done with the same amount of time and resources is a question I will leave to others. What I want to look at here are the trade law implications.

The general idea behind the WTO is not to eliminate trade barriers but to bring them under control. This happens through a process in which members negotiate those trade barriers among themselves. The trade barriers you are allowed to have are the ones that were agreed to in negotiations. You can’t come along later and unilaterally erect new ones. If you think other members are cheating, there’s a process for dealing with that. “Trade barriers” includes not just tariffs, but also domestic sourcing requirements, since such requirements (in the vision of trade embodied in the WTO agreements) distort what would otherwise be the “normal” flow of exports and imports under agreed-upon barriers.

The WTO does not, and cannot, prohibit private parties from deciding on their own to buy domestic products even if it doesn’t make economic sense to do so. But it generally prohibits governments from ordering or even encouraging them to do so. (Canada was found in violation of this principle back in the pre-WTO era for having a requirement that foreign investors source domestically when the domestic price was the same or cheaper – i.e., a very modest burden.)

What about government purchases? Can the government decide on its own that it prefers domestic sources, even when they’re more expensive? Yes – this is an exception to the general rule against requiring or encouraging domestic sourcing, partly because the government is in a sense just making its own “private” decision. But governments can also commit on a reciprocal basis to opening up their procurement markets by signing on to the Government Procurement Agreement. The US is a member; China is not.

As a result, if the USOC is a governmental entity, then it can decide on its own or be ordered by government to prefer domestic sources without China being able to complain. (Other GPA members might able to complain, though.)

But is it? It’s a federally chartered corporation under the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act. But that doesn’t make it a federal governmental agency any more than a Delaware corporation is a creature of the Delaware state government. It receives no federal money. As I read the USOC’s bylaws, the board of directors is entirely self-perpetuating, and no US government official, elected or not, has any say in their selection. I stress that I’m not an expert in what counts as a governmental entity for purposes of the GPA, but my guess is that the USOC would not.

If that’s so, then it has to be able to decide on its own whether to source domestically or not. If the USOC board members, on the basis of a misguided sense of patriotism, bribes from textile manufacturers, pressure from their mothers, or instructions from the Great Pumpkin appearing to them in a dream, decide to source domestically even when it would be cheaper to go abroad, that’s OK under WTO rules. (This is why the policy’s stated exception for non-compliance with applicable trade agreements or treaties to which the US is a party makes no sense – the USOC, as a private party, cannot violate those agreements; only the US government can.) What is not OK, I think, is for board members to make this decision under government pressure.

If it would not be permitted for the US government to mandate the USOC to source uniforms domestically (that would be, if nothing else, nullification or impairment under Art. XXIII of the GATT), surely it is not permitted for it to engage in backroom armtwisting to achieve the same result. Of course, it’s harder to bring a WTO case when backroom armtwisting is involved, because when armtwisting takes place in the back room, it’s hard to get evidence. In this case, however, the armtwisting took place in the living room, with a big picture window facing the street and paparazzi outside recording every second.

I remember the outcry over China’s indigenous innovation policy, which after all involved government procurement and was therefore not even WTO-illegal. And I remember the, ahem, skepticism that greeted China’s claim that when its exporters stopped shipping rare earths to Japan just at the time that China was pissed off at Japan, the government had nothing to do with it. I don’t think it is really in the interest of the US to promote the principle in international trade that reneging on your promises is OK provided you do it through private meetings and off-the-record phone calls and not through formal legislation.

Li Qinghong is (or was) a real estate businessman who in March of 2010 was sentenced by a court in Guiyang to 19 years' imprisonment for involvement in organized crime. The story of what happened afterwards is fascinating and is recounted here (in English and Chinese) on the Tea Leaf Nation blog. The long and the short of it is that an increasingly vigorous defense was mounted, a number of lawyers got involved, gross procedural problems were exposed, and ultimately (surprise!) the conviction was upheld on retrial. Plenty of grist for both optimists and pessimists.